We are delighted to announce that Professor Roumiana Tsenkova is the recipient of the Council for Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (CNIRS)’s Gerald Birth Award for the year 2024 in recognition of her exceptional contributions to the development of near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), particularly in her pioneering work on non-invasive disease diagnostics and as the founder of Aquaphotomics.
In 2005, Prof. R. Tsenkova proposed for the first time newly discovered water absorbance bands and spectral patterns specific for biological and aqueous systems and proposed to build up a database called aquaphotome to be further used for diagnosis, quantification and functional characterization on a system level discovering the phenomena of water being a collective mirror of matter and energy.
The Award is given especially for Professor Tsenkova’ and collaborators’ Aquaphotomics work on elucidating the water activity in food*1. The significance of this work is for discovering the correlation between the absorbance at water vapor absorbance bands and water activity proving the definition of water activity and for presenting water spectral pattern as a new dynamic multidimensional biomarker for food preservation.
Read the announcement of the 2024 Gerald S. Birth Award Winner
The Award ceremony will be held at the International Diffuse Reflectance Conference at University of Tennessee, the US, on August 1st, 2024, and the awardee presentation will be held on July 31st, 2024. Professor Tsenkova and Associate Professor Jelena Muncan will lead the Aquaphotomics session as the session chairs on the same day of July 31st. Please check the conference website for the latest schedule. We look forward to your participation!
You can check the details about the conference:
International Diffuse Reflectance Conference (IDRC) July 27 – August 2, 2024
The Gerald Birth Award
The Gerald S. Birth Award is a distinguished honor bestowed by the Council for Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (CNIRS) to recognize outstanding innovation in the fields of diffuse reflection or diffuse transmission spectroscopy. Established in memory of Dr. Gerald S. Birth, the founder of the International Diffuse Reflectance Conference (IDRC), this award celebrates significant advancements and contributions to the art and science of Near Infrared (NIR) spectroscopy.
Dr. Birth made notable contributions to the development of instrumentation technologies related to diffuse reflectance, and the award is conferred biennially to researchers whose work exemplifies groundbreaking progress in these areas. Eligible candidates are those conducting research in the visible, NIR, or mid-IR regions of diffuse reflection or transmission spectroscopy.
*1 Malegori, C., Muncan, J., Mustorgi, E., Tsenkova, R. and Oliveri, P. Analysing the Water Spectral Pattern by Near-Infrared Spectroscopy and Chemometrics as a Dynamic Multidimensional Biomarker in Preservation: Rice Germ Storage Monitoring. Spectrochimica Acta Part A: Molecular and Biomolecular Spectroscopy (IF 4.4), p.120396, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.saa.2021.120396